Ramblings

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Streaming services were at first heralded as the beginning of the end of piracy and copyright infringement. It provided a better service and as such quickly outcompeted the then widespread Kazaa, Napster and Limewire, peer to peer filesharing applications that millions used to get music and other pieces of media for free. In the music industry, this is Spotify, and in the video branche this is Netflix, in the gaming sphere it's Steam. This was a great deal for both the platforms and the consumers: For just a small, monthly fee users had access to more media content they could ever wish to consume, available anywhere anytime, no large investments required and, best of all, legally! Everyone - except of course the humans actually creating the content (see Spotify) - wins.

However, this honeymoon period lasted only for so long, because these industried would end up becoming really, really competitive. Movies and shows are now spread apart across multiple different vendors/platforms, sometimes even on a per-season basis, subscription fees skyrocket and content is being pulled offline left and right. It turns out that relying on a central corporation to administer your content to you is actually very risky and will see you disappointed more often than not. This is particularly true for content like video games, where recently Ubisoft has pulled The Crew and made it entirely unplayable, or EA who are delisting old games of their F1 video games series because the games released in 2023 and before are products that are virtually indistinguishable from their most recent renditions, eating into their profits because players would just buy the cheap F1 2020 game instead of the expensive F1 2025 which offers almost nothing new in comparison (apart from new monetization models).

These kinds of things have become pretty widespread phenomena, so much so that the public has become quite irritated by its nature and coined the phrase “If Buying isn't Owning, then Pirating isn't Stealing”. The idea is that if everything is loaned out to you and corporate retains full control over their products and can just decide to revoke your access to their content, then you aren't really buying anything. If the stuff you paid for, sometimes even full price, can just be taken away from you at any time for any reason at the shortest possible notice, then nobody is really owning anything, and what can't be owned can't be stolen either.